New York: Mother and 4 kids stabbed to death by father's cousin

[News_Editor]

NEW YORK CITY (BNO NEWS) -- A Chinese immigrant was arrested Sunday after allegedly stabbing his cousin's wife and her four young children to death at their home in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, police said. It happened while the husband and father of the victims was at work.

Police responded to the apartment building in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn at approximately 10:44 p.m. local time on Saturday after receiving a 911 call of a person stabbed. Upon arrival, officers discovered five people, all of them unconscious and unresponsive, whom all had stab wounds to the upper parts of their bodies.

A police spokesperson said paramedics pronounced a 1-year-old boy, a 7-year-old girl, and a 9-year-old girl deceased upon arrival at the scene. The 37-year-old mother was rushed to Lutheran Hospital and her 5-year-old son was rushed to Maimonides Hospital, but both were also pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospitals.

25-year-old Ming Don Chen, who came to the U.S. from China in 2004 but was unemployed with financial problems, was taken into custody at the scene as a person of interest and later implicated himself, NYPD Department Chief Phil Banks said. The suspect, a cousin of the children's father, was arrested on early Sunday and later charged with five counts of murder.

The victims were identified as 37-year-old Qiao Zhen Li, 9-year-old Linda Zhuo, 7-year-old Amy Zhuo, 5-year-old Kevin Zhuo, and 1-year-old William Zhuo. The father, whose identity was not immediately released, was at work at the time of the killings, but Chen had been living with the family for several days.

Banks said Li had become concerned about Chen's behavior on Saturday night, after which she unsuccessfully tried to call her husband. She then called her mother-in-law in China, who asked her daughter - who also lives in Brooklyn - to check on Li, but when she and her husband arrived no one answered the door.

The father of the children returned home from work later in the evening and was told the news through a Chinese interpreter. "The father was freaking out. He just came home from work and saw the police and they told him. He was hysterical," a neighbor told the New York Daily News.

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[Scott]

Very sad. RIP.